


firestarting

by Laburnum



Category: A Dark Room (Video Game)
Genre: F/F, POV Second Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-18
Updated: 2017-12-18
Packaged: 2019-02-16 08:10:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,730
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13050015
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Laburnum/pseuds/Laburnum
Summary: The materials of a fire comprise three parts: the tinder, the kindling, and the fuel.





	firestarting

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tahanrien](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tahanrien/gifts).



> Not _The Ensign_ -compliant.  
> Thanks, C, for teaching me to build fires.

 

 

 

The night is cold and drafty, like all nights are in the bitter autumns here, but all the nights before this one you were sheltered and warm, not out in the open with nowhere to go.

Between the edges of the scarf wrapped around your face you see the shape of a hut in the distance, illuminated from within by the soft flickering of firelight. Your face stings from the wind and your legs ache from the terrible distance you have walked that day in search of shelter, and you walk to the door as the wind blows through the holes in your cloak, and knock the signal you are sure the inhabitant does not know.

The door opens a crack and you steel yourself for the knife to the gut, but it never comes. The face hidden by shadow moves into the light, and as the woman stands aside to let you in, you memorize each line of her face instantly. Behind her is the fire, a flicker of warmth in the dark and drafty night.

She shuts the door behind you and moves to stoke the fire, stick by stick, and your cold hands and face thaw gradually in the warmth as you watch her. When the fire blazes high enough that it looks as if the whole room is alight, she finally looks at you. “Who are you?” she asks.

Your mouth tries to form the syllables of your given name, but you have forgotten how they sound. You are in full survival mode, and the only thing you know how to say is what you think she might need from you, so that she might have a reason to let you live.

Wood, stacked in a neat pile by the fire. “I build things,” you say.

 

* * *

 

 

Carts to move wood, traps for animals and food, another hut to sleep in. The wanderer thinks of something and asks you if you can do it, and you deliver the goods without fail, one after one.

She offers her spare roof to some passing travelers, asks if she can bunk with you for a night. You agree happily: she builds fires better than you can, and that evening a fire burns high and strong in your cabin, too.

When the family has sufficiently rested from their journey, they ask if they can stay.

 

*

 

No one is really the last of their kind. Even when people lose everything they care about, there will always be something left behind. A cooking pot left over a dead fire still holding the remnants of a meal, or dusty winter blankets piled over an unmade bed.

Since the many-handed attacker came for your family that day, you have lived in many places. People are always in need of woodworking skills, and are happy to give you shelter in return for it. But always, when you think you are finally safe, something will come for all of you: beasts, the many-handed creatures, the plague, raiders who care more for your carefully stockpiled supplies than your lives. But you’re good at running, and it’s a bit like making fires: as long as the embers remain, you can build it up again. As long as you survive, you can always find somewhere else to go.

Give people what they need, and in return, they will give you a home.

 

* * *

 

 

Days and weeks and months pass, and people flock to the small shelters you both have built. Old and young, men and women, hunters and trappers. Other survivors with your skillset, who make things better than you do. Even so, you are the only one she calls builder, and every time it warms you the way the fire had blazed on that very first night.

The wanderer is different from you: from all of you. Gray eyes, gray nails, gray lips, as if beneath her dirt-stained skin there is no warm flesh, only metal like a machine. Gray, like the eternal fog and the sky outside. She eats with the others, small portions of whatever is cooking over the communal fire that evening, but you never see her sleep.

Sometimes things go missing from storehouses; sometimes traps are destroyed with no tracks to say what did it. Every time she gets up quietly to investigate, and sometimes she returns with blood on her hands. “There was a beast,” she might say, sparks in gray eyes. “It’s dead now.”

Visitors, some of them thieves. Wild beasts. “Predators become prey. The price is unfair,” she says.

You shake your head. "What fairness? It just is what it is."

 

* * *

 

 

The child of the new family knocks on your door and asks in a hushed tone if you know about the wanderer.

You nod. “What about it?”

“She’s not like us.”

“What about it?” you repeat again.

“—Aren’t you scared?”

The wanderer cut her hands on the edge of a tool, once. You were the only one still in the workshop that night, and when you went to hand her antiseptic and bandages you saw that the wound leaked steel gray, not red. You had handed her the materials and said nothing about it, and her hands had been warm, not cold like they seemed.

“I am,” you say, and think about many hands wielding many knives, and running from them. “But none of us would be here, if not for her.”

 

* * *

 

 

She gathers supplies and makes preparations to venture out into the wasteland bordering your small town. It feels like tearing out a piece of your heart—safety in this world is so very, terribly difficult to come by. But you know what loss is like. For her sake, you will not be afraid.

Each time she leaves, you pray to whatever gods still exist to keep her safe. Every time she returns with clothes soaked in gray blood, terribly wounded but not dead. Not dead. That is the most important thing. As long as she lives—

As long as the embers still glow, fires can start again.

 

* * *

 

Late night in the common area, going over the plans for the steel mine she found on her last excursion. The fire burns low, and she gets up to stoke it.

“You don’t have to,” you say quietly.

“It is cold out, and maintaining a body temperature within the suitable range is necessary to live.”

The quarters where she sleeps now are always dark and freezing, so if she keeps this fire going, it must be for your sake. “The wood’s running out,” you say quietly, and get up as if to head to the shack so she does not have to see your face.

Her hand catches your wrist and tightens like a vise. “You are not suited to what you do.”

“Is my work not good enough?” you ask quietly.

“It is good enough. But I want to know why you do it.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

In another life you are someone’s daughter, someone’s wife, someone’s mother. You work in a school, or maybe a hospital. But the world changed very much before you grew up, and the path your life might have taken changed with it. Now, you are the one she calls builder. That is all you need to be.

In place of answering she pulls you to her and kisses you, slowly, softer than men usually do and softer than you had thought her capable of. Her hands that have hewn wood, wrestled beasts, swung swords now wrap around your shoulders, calluses rough but gentle against your skin. Your hands are the same, you know, and there is comfort in the familiarity.

She pulls back to look at you and you meet her eyes: steel grey, alight. “Is this alright?”

You nod, and wrap a hand around the back of her neck into her short-cropped hair and kiss her again.

The cloth over her window rustles as a breeze blows in, and in the corner of the room, the fire flickers. You nestle your head in her shoulder away from the light, and curl up into its warmth, and hers.

 

*

 

Six years of age, your mother decided it was time for you to be useful.

She took you to see the chainsaw in the toolshed—too heavy for you to lift at the time—and the farming equipment by the barn. She showed you the closet containing the different varieties of hammers and pliers and wrenches, down to the tiny levers and screws your father used to repair watches.

She showed you how to work a sander and a saw, and smiled when the wood hummed and shaped itself beneath your tools and your hands.

 

* * *

 

 

The strange material the wanderer brings back is not quite metal and not quite concrete. When she looks at it, her eyes light in a way you have never seen, and you know immediately how you will lose her.

She asks if you can resume production of steel and sulfur, materials you have not needed for a very long time. Not for the well-being of the village, but for—

It is the first time she is silent when you ask her what for. “—Further excursions,” she says, at length.

You do not understand, but you keep working, as do the others. You owe her that much.

You practice goodbyes: "I wish you well." You hope that when the day does come, you will really mean it.

 

 

* * *

 

When the wanderer does leave, none of you notice, at first. She gives no announcement and no warning: only you notice that she is not at the noon meal, and when you go to check, you find that that none of the usual exploration supplies— waterskins, food, weaponry—are gone from their places.

Nothing has changed, and the haul from the traps had been good that day and spirits are high around the campfires. The small village is self-sufficient now: sturdy shelters, traps for food, ores for trade, weapons for self-protection; her presence or absence no longer matters, and maybe that was what she had hoped for all along. Even so, her absence tears through you, like the chill of the wind on that very first night.

You think —hope— that she is going where she really belongs.

In the small house where the wanderer used to live, the fire burns low, then lower, then goes out.

 


End file.
